Festivals and fairs especially busy ones tend to have long line ups at entrances and exits as it takes time to process visitors and to validate their tickets or other entrance credentials. Thus visitors are required to wait, rain or shine, and waste valuable time that could have been spent actually enjoying the event.
The festival industry is booming and is providing a fertile ground for vendors to showcase and offer sampling opportunities to their customer base. Such temporary events are proving to be attractive marketing campaigns for vendors looking to increase their customer base and introduce new consumers to their products by offering an opportunity to sample various items.
A festival is an event ordinarily staged by a community, centering on and celebrating some unique aspect of that community and its traditions, often marked as a local or national holiday. Festivals often serve to meet specific purposes, especially in regard to commemoration and/or celebration. A festival provides an opportunity for people to come together and celebrate while also partaking in entertainment.
A food festival is an event celebrating food or drink. A food festival usually highlights the output of producers from a certain region. Some food festivals are focused on a particular type of food item. There are also specific beverage festivals, such as the famous Oktoberfest in Germany for beer. Many cities hold festivals to celebrate wine or other produce from local producers.
A fair is a gathering of people to display or trade produce or other goods, to parade or display animals and often to enjoy associated entertainment like a circus or midway attractions. Festivals and fairs are normally temporary in nature; some last only an afternoon while others may last a few days.
Since the nature of festivals and fairs is temporary and the vendors participating in these events are generally small local vendors who have limited to no technology at their disposal; consumer information gathering at such events is not possible.
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is the wireless non-contact use of radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to transfer data for the purposes of automatically identifying and tracking tags attached to objects. The tags contain electronically stored information. Some RFID tags are powered by and read at short ranges (a few centimeters) via electromagnetic induction. Other types of RFID tags may use a local power source such as a battery, or else have no battery but collect energy from the interrogating electromagnetic field, and then act as a passive transponder to emit microwaves or UHF (ultra high frequency) radio waves. Unlike a bar code, the RFID tag does not necessarily need to be within line of sight of the reader, and may be embedded in an object.
RFID tags can be passive or active or battery-assisted passive. A passive tag is cheaper and smaller because it has no battery. An active tag has an on-board battery and periodically transmits its ID signal. A battery-assisted passive (BAP) tag has a small battery on board and is activated when in the presence of an RFID reader.
RFID tags may either be read-only, having a factory-assigned serial number that is used as a key into a database, or may be read/write, where object-specific data can be written into the RFID tag by the system. Field programmable RFID tags may be write-once, read-multiple; “blank” RFID tags may be written with an electronic product code by the user.
Generally fixed RFID readers are set up to create a specific interrogation zone which can be tightly controlled. This allows a highly defined reading area for when tags go in and out of the interrogation zone. Mobile RFID readers may be hand-held or mounted on carts or vehicles. But all of the aforementioned prior art methods are manual and require a work force to scan the RFID tags.
Despite advances in technology, prior art methods still have several shortcomings e.g. a lack of information gathering about consumer sampling at a festival or fair. Since the duration of a festival or fair is so brief, conventional methods for setting up and collecting consumer behaviour information are not suitable or may cost too much to provide a meaningful business benefit. Thus consumer information is neither collected nor compiled in real time to be useful due to the brevity of the event. Thus a wholesale change is needed in the way brands and/or vendors and/or manufacturers (distributors, event organizers, exhibitors, etc.) engage with their audience from basic entry all the way to post event communication and data mining.
To compound this problem, consumers have steadily been moving away from cash based transactions as they don't want the hassle of carrying cash and coins, which can also be easily lost or stolen in the rush of a festival. One method to overcome this limitation is to use touchless and cashless transaction methods that provide convenience and save time. One method of achieving touchless and cashless transactions is through credit cards. Wristbands have also arisen that are embedded with RFID (Radio-frequency identification) tags and can be used as a touchless payment fob. RFID tags allow for a “tap and go” style of payment because the information is transmitted wirelessly. Two-way radio transmitter-receivers called readers send a signal to the tag and read its response. In such a transaction the user is not required to sign a piece of paper or to enter the PIN number, and neither there is any verification of signature.
Prior art methods, such as paper tickets, used at fairs, festivals, and similar events to process visitors are manual and slow. Token systems using physical items to act as a medium for exchange for goods at the event have been used but require the exchange of real currency for another physical item that must be carried around. These do not improve the guests' experience and often hinder that experience by now requiring plastic tokens or another medium to be cared for. Further, such tokens do not allow for an automated way to capture the transaction data from the event. Tokens must be exchanged in a similar way as hard currency and thus are equally slow and “dumb”.
Such methods are outdated and take away from the pleasure of attending events that are brief in nature.